How can you make your brand stay top-of-mind, engage your audience and generate more leads and sales? It’s not a trick question: A company newsletter can help make all of those things a reality.
They are most effective when you follow company newsletter best practices. So let’s break it down. In this guide, you’ll learn how to create a newsletter that follows all design, open rate, and technical best practices. And you’ll find the one tool that lets you follow all of those practices with ease.
A company newsletter is a publication circulated by businesses or bloggers on a regular basis.
It’s sent to customers, readers, fans, subscribers, employees or potential customers.
In most cases, a newsletter is part of a wider strategy. It’s helpful for staying top of mind, providing value, positioning yourself as an authority, building brand awareness, and nurturing relationships with your audience. It can also be good to generate traffic to your website, blog or social media pages.
Once trust is built, newsletters can generate great ROI and grow audiences and businesses. That is, of course, if you follow company newsletter best practices…
What Makes a Good Newsletter?
A sure sign of a good newsletter is one people want to read. So, it will have a healthy open rate and click-through rate, and benefit the reputation of the sender.
But how do you create a newsletter like that?
There are three key tips to keep in mind:
Include valuable information and actionable advice. Stay away from vague information that can be found with a Google search. Aim for high-value tips and updates.
Add your unique perspective. Build authority by sharing your thoughts on industry news, always adding something new to the conversation.
Opt for a personable tone of voice. The best company newsletters feel warm and friendly - like a conversation with a friend. Remember that emails offer a chance to connect with prospects one-on-one. Keep it fun, friendly and lighthearted.
A beautiful design. Design can mean the difference between an email that goes in the virtual trash, and one that engages your audience, keeping them reading until the end. An email builder can help with that. This is a drag-and-drop tool with hundreds of professional, engaging templates, ready for you to use and customize down to the last detail.
What are the Goals of Email Newsletters?
An email newsletter is usually part of a wider business goal, like brand awareness, audience building or conversions.
However, you’re up against a lot of competition, so those things aren’t exactly straightforward.
According to the Harvard Graduate School of Education, the average person receives around 120 emails every day, and only spends 9 seconds reading each email before moving on.
To break through and get attention (and action) in the inbox, focus on these two primary goals:
Get the recipient to open your newsletter. Use clear, engaging subject lines to get your newsletter noticed and opened.
Get the recipient to click links in your newsletter. Whether you’re directing traffic to your website, blog or product page, compelling content and strong CTAs encourage clicks.
Insider tip: Your newsletter design is key to boosting click rate. Engaging, compelling sections, bold subheadings and eye-catching buttons guide readers toward your goal.
Use an email builder to make the process fast, affordable and stress-free. You can choose from hundreds of newsletter templates that follow best design practices, and customize them in minutes with your branding, images and copy! So, you won’t need to hire designers or coders, and can save money as well as time.
What are Newsletter Design Best Practices?
Newsletter design best practices bring together guidelines to boost engagement as well as ensure accessibility.
In other words, your email should reach its goals while being legible for everyone.
Here are some high-level design best practices to keep in mind:
Optimize the structure. Enhance readability and engagement with a well-structured email. Use bold headings, digestible sections and images to guide recipients through your newsletter effectively.
Don’t send all-image emails. They won’t be visible to people who use screen readers or an email provider that doesn’t show images. This means some of your subscribers wouldn’t be able to see any of your content.
Include alt text for images. This is a description of the image - helpful for anyone using screen readers or when images don’t load.
Use high-contrast colors. Your elements (especially text and CTAs) will be more eye-catching and legible when they stand out against the background color. e.g. use black or other dark shades to contrast with white backgrounds.
Think 60:40 for images. Aim for a text-to-image ratio of 60:40. Multi-media is a great way to break up text, but too much can clutter your newsletter, which can be overwhelming.
Use an email builder. Email builders come with a vast library of well-designed templates that follow all best practices, giving you the peace of mind that your newsletter is as engaging as possible. Email builders have powerful multimedia libraries, so you can add eye-catching images, videos and GIFs to your newsletter with a simple drag and drop.
Here’s an example of a newsletter template from an email builder that follows all best practices. You can use and customize this template for your newsletter today! Just click the link below the template to get started.
The first goal of any newsletter is to make sure people open it. Otherwise, what’s the point? Your newsletter will simply get lost in the inbox and you won’t get the many potential benefits.
If you continue to offer valuable, interesting information, subscribers will be more inclined to open your newsletter. On top of that, your subject line does most of the heavy lifting when it comes to your open rate.
Follow these best practices to optimize your subject lines:
Use personalization. Include your subscribers’ names but you can get creative with personalization, too. For example: [Name], need some tips to survive NY winter?
Be clear: Let subscribers know what to expect when they open your email. Keep it short and catchy, but be as clear and descriptive as possible. We know: It’s not easy!
A/B test subject lines: Experiment with different subject lines for each newsletter. This gives you insights into the structure and language that work best for you.
Some other open rate best practices to keep in mind include:
Stick to a consistent sender name. This makes sure you’re recognizable in the inbox. People would rather open emails from those they know and trust!
Complete the preview text: This is the line of copy below the subject line. Use it to add further details and give recipients an extra reason to open your newsletter.
An email builder lets you measure metrics like open rates, click rates and heat maps so you can see which content is popular, and improve your newsletter with every issue. They offer detailed analytics to help you make informed decisions about all aspects of your newsletter - from subject line to design and content.
These analytics (including open rates, click rates, geo locations and social sharing) are available no matter where you send newsletters from. So, you can track performance even if you use Gmail or Outlook!
Try it out using this template. With its engaging layout and use of high-quality imagery, you can be sure it follows all best practices.
Now that recipients have opened your email, you want them to click the links.
Follow these company newsletter best practices to encourage people to act on your content:
Use a consistent template that showcases your brand identity. This lets subscribers know who you are and what they can expect to find. Plus, you can update templates from an email builder using a “Brand Kit”, saving you time and ensuring all newsletters are on-brand. Whichever member of the team works on your newsletter, the Brand Kit lets them align everything (from fonts to colors) with your brand guidelines.
Include “teaser” copy. Keep each section short and sweet, and include CTAs for subscribers to click through if they want more information.
Share value. Promotion usually isn’t the primary purpose of a company newsletter; value is. So, share educational content, best practice tips and even freebies. Aim for around 90% educational and 10% promotional content.
Check out this template to see a design that follows click rate best practices. It contains bite-sized, teaser sections, bold CTAs and beautiful images, to optimize clicks and boost the success of newsletters.
There are a few ways you can make sure your newsletter is sent successfully out into the world.
You’ve worked hard on developing a beautiful, professional newsletter. So, it makes sense to get the sending process right. Here are our favorite best practice tips:
Stick to a regular sending schedule. Whether it’s quarterly, monthly, weekly or daily, choose a sending schedule that lets you share value every time - and stick to it.
Choose the right sending platform. Choose the best newsletter platform for your blog or business. Some tools are more basic while others offer advanced features, so do a little research and make use of free trials before you commit.
Preview emails before sending them. Most ESPs let you preview emails (on desktop and mobile) and send test emails. Use this feature to catch any broken links or misaligned content*.
*When you create emails with an email builder, your designs are made with email-optimized code - and tested to make sure they work on every platform. This means your newsletter will render perfectly across every email server, device and screen size.
What are Technical Email Best Practices?
Following all company newsletter best practices demands knowing some technical basics. This doesn’t have to get too complicated.
To get you started, here are some of the technical best practices to keep in mind:
Keep your list clean. Only add people to your distribution list if they explicitly signed up, and never buy contacts. This makes sure every email address is legitimate to reduce bounce rate (the emails that don’t make it to inboxes). A high bounce rate can flag you as spam, so this is important!
Follow compliance regulations. In the USA, the CAN-SPAM Act outlines regulations for email marketing. For example, your newsletter needs to contain information like your company name and address.
Segment your email list. Split up larger audiences to make sure you’re only sending content they’re interested in. To find out what people are interested in, send an email survey or provide multiple options in your opt-in form.
Speed up the process with an email builder. Email builders have advanced features that make designing stunning emails fast and easy. For example, you can share links to videos and articles on the web using a dynamic scraping tool. Just copy and paste the URL and the tool automatically populates key information, without any extra manual input from you. With so many user-intuitive tools at your fingertips, you’ll have more time to come up with great newsletter content ideas.
Speed up the design process so you have more time to nail the technicalities of the send. This template could be a perfect starting point. It’s available to use and customize. Plus, you can save your design and reuse it for future newsletters, saving lots of time.
What are Email Newsletter Strategy Best Practices?
Thinking outside the box and launching a unique strategy helps your newsletter stand out from the hundreds of others in your industry.
Again, we can keep this simple. Consider the following strategies:
Write a strong welcome email. Introduce new subscribers in the best way. Welcoming them into your community and providing some insights about what they can expect is a good way to engage people and grow your list.
Use your company branding. Whether you’re writing external or internal newsletters, use your company colors, logo and other branding features to make it instantly recognizable and trustworthy. Use the Brand Kit in email builders to bring your branding to life. This saves your brand assets and styles (for your CTAs and headings, for example) in one place. It automatically applies these styles when you add them to a newsletter - for instantly on-brand newsletters.
Launch a “mini course”. Ask subscribers if they’d like to receive a mini course - an email series that dives deeper into a particular topic over a fixed number of days. This is a great way to share fresh, valuable content, and keep those ideas flowing.
Here’s a beautiful template that can be customized for just about any industry and use case. Click the link below to start adding your own stamp, knowing the template has been designed to follow best practices and boost engagement.
Don’t let a lack of email newsletter content ideas get in the way of a great newsletter.
Keep in mind that high-value content is the aim of the game. Here are some ideas to get you started:
Blog posts. Drive traffic to your blog by including a small post summary and a CTA. A good email builder dynamically scrapes web URLs for images, titles, descriptions and hyperlinks, saving you time. Simply paste the URL and the email builder does the rest.
How-to guides. Provide educational content that helps subscribers get the most out of your product or service.
Discounts and promotions: This should be a small part of your newsletter, but it’s still important if your goal is to grow revenue. Give subscribers a first look at sales, discounts and promotions.
Contests. Build excitement and engagement with contests and giveaways, such as raffles or competitions that encourage UGC. For example, you might launch a photography or cake-baking competition.
Video content. Videos are great for engagement. Include video tutorials or testimonials to give your subscribers something special.
Industry news and webinars. Keep your community updated with industry news and informative webinars. This helps solidify your status as an authority in your space.
Wrap Up
There might be a lot of company newsletter best practices to follow. However, if you introduce an email builder into the process, you can be confident you’re following every tip to build the most effective newsletter for your company.
With customizable templates designed for readability, engagement and conversions, as well as time-saving features and designs that are optimized for every screen, email builders turn anyone into a pro email marketer.
